The Motion.ai acquisition is kind of a big deal for the whole chatbot space. Here’s why.
HubSpot announced that it has acquired Motion.ai. The details of the acquisition are not known yet; nonetheless, this acquisition is actually a big deal for the whole chatbot space.
And the reason is simple: Up until last week, chatbots were thought to be best at customer support and maybe for some one-off outreach campaign. Please raise your hand if you had this idea the first time you looked at a Messenger chatbot. Or the first time you tried an Alexa skill.
I see why customer support and one-off marketing campaigns are fit for chatbots. But it is limiting to think those are the only (or the best) use cases.
Does HubSpot focus on customer support? Or on one-off marketing efforts?
No.
But maybe they want to change and tackle those challenges?
No.
So what’s the deal here?
HubSpot is a inbound marketing expert. They are the best in building tools that create and qualify leads. This is their focus. This is not going to change. The reason why HubSpot acquires motion.ai is actually more direct and simple. The team at HubSpot knows that conversational interfaces can be very effective in creating and qualifying leads.
So why is this a big deal for the whole space?
This acquisition makes blatantly clear that the conversational interfaces are a very, very good solution also for this kind of use case. And rest assured that, once a market leader like HubSpot consolidates its offer, the rest of the industry will follow. Soon, the conversational approach to the creation and nurturing of leads will be widespread. This shift opens up an opportunity for agencies, consultancy firms and professionals which are now focused on other forms of inbound marketing.
What’s next?
It will be interesting to see how marketers and designers approach the chatbot design in this new context. An effective lead-generation chatbot may be deployed on multiple context like a classic chatbot. So, for example, you will want to deploy it on Facebook Messenger, into a dedicated landing page and on a voice assistant like the Google Assistant. And this is true also for customer-support chatbots.
But this is not the only design variation needed. A lead generation chatbot has to be very adaptive depending on the way the source of traffic of the user. For example: A user that has reached your “lead-gen” chatbot via an Ad should have a very focused, direct experience, consistent with the Call To Action and copy of the ad. A very different experience should be provided to the user that is asking some questions after 3 minutes of browsing into the website. Multiple channels will require their own experience.
Think of it this way: When you run a AdWords + Facebook + Instagram campaign, each channel requires a dedicated landing page, if you want optimised results. The business logic of such landing pages will be the same, but the design and the copy of each will differ.
The challenge is the same if you build a chatbot. Each channel will require its own, optimised, copy and interaction. The business logic, NLP, and API-integration of the chatbot will remain the same. The design of the chatbot will have to change.
